


Muscle Memory

by CatWingsAthena



Series: Autistic Mac Headcanon [1]
Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Autistic Angus MacGyver (MacGyver TV 2016), Gen, James MacGyver is a dick, Those last two tags are related, and no one is surprised, army days, internalized ableism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-24
Updated: 2019-05-24
Packaged: 2020-03-14 14:48:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18950284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CatWingsAthena/pseuds/CatWingsAthena
Summary: It took Jack a while to notice.In his defense, most of the time, Mac's nonverbal communication seemed perfectly normal.But sometimes, that changed.Or, the one where Mac is autistic, James MacGyver is an ass, and Jack is understanding about the whole thing.





	Muscle Memory

**Author's Note:**

> Hey everybody! I wrote this because, as an autistic person, I normally have a pretty decent neuroatypical radar, but reboot Mac was giving me mixed signals. I couldn't tell if he was autistic, had ADHD (for the record, original Mac pretty much screams ADHD to me), or was neurotypical. Then I thought, why would someone give off vibes like that? And then I thought... oh. And I wrote this fic. Warnings for internalized ableism and past crappy parenting.

It took Jack a while to notice.

In his defense, most of the time, Mac’s nonverbal communication seemed perfectly normal. He used normal eye contact to engage, prolonged eye contact as a challenge, and lack of eye contact to indicate that he didn’t want to talk. His body language was confident, secure. He knew how to carry on a conversation without talking.

But sometimes, that changed. Whenever Mac was thinking hard, he stopped looking at Jack entirely. His posture shifted, and he started fidgeting up a storm.

Jack might have brushed that off as just a Mac thing (or just a  _ that annoying kid _ thing, or just a  _ Carl’s Jr.  _ thing, or just an  _ Angus _ thing)--and, for a long time, he did.

But Jack had years of sometimes-bitter experience reading nonverbal signals.

And the signals Mac was sending when he was distracted kept reminding him of something.

It was twenty-one days into his second tour when he finally got it.

Mac was acting like his nephew.

His nephew, who just happened to be autistic.

No, that was impossible. Mac  _ couldn’t _ be autistic... could he? He’d certainly never shown any abnormal aversion to loud noises, and he dealt with uncomfortable clothes, weird food, and the various other minor indignities of army life as well as anyone. So he probably didn’t have sensory issues like Matthew did... or, if he did, he was just  _ really _ good at putting up with them. (That last thought broke Jack’s heart a little. He knew it was entirely possible, based on the amount of pain he’d seen the kid put up with without saying a word.) He didn’t (usually) infodump about things--and he certainly knew enough to. Jack had never seen him stim, except the fidgeting. And he seemed totally normal in terms of eye contact and body language, most of the time. It was just when he was distracted... oh.

It hit Jack like a bullet. Mac probably was autistic--but he was scared to let anyone know. Made sense, the army would probably send him home if they knew, and Mac... Mac wanted to do as much good as he could. It would kill him to be forced to stop saving lives.

And Mac was  _ brilliant _ . It would have been entirely doable for him to learn all this stuff by rote. But still. Jack shook his head at the amount of mental energy Mac must be constantly expending just to appear normal.

Mental energy that he could be expending doing things like, y’know, disarming bombs.

Yeah, Jack really needed to have a talk with Mac.

...

Jack was driving himself and Mac back to base at the end of a mission (Jack had learned long ago that it was better for him to be driving, in case Mac’s hands and brain were suddenly pressed into service) when he realized that this was his golden opportunity. They’d been up for a long time (not that Jack  _ meant _ to take advantage of his partner’s state of sleep deprivation, but, well, Mac wasn’t the chatty sort when it came to personal stuff, and Jack needed all the help he could get), and they were going to be alone for a while with nothing to do. Perfect.

Jack had been expounding for a while on the relative merits of the original three Star Wars movies while Mac’s head lolled back. He looked about two seconds from falling asleep, and Jack was tempted to allow it, but he didn’t know when he’d get another chance like this.

And he needed to have this conversation sooner rather than later.

“Hey Mac,” Jack said casually--or at least he was trying for casual. 

Mac raised his head. “What?”

“Are you autistic?”

Mac  _ froze. _

“Wh- why do you ask?” he said, suddenly wide awake. “Did I do something?”

“No,” Jack replied. “You didn’t do anything wrong. And I’m not upset, and I’m not gonna tell anyone if you are, okay?”

Mac nodded. “Okay.”

“So, I take it that’s a tricky question.”

“I mean--” Mac took a deep breath-- “the answer’s yes--but I don’t know how you figured it out, I thought I had it under control...”

“Hey, hey,” said Jack gently. “I get that you need to hide it here, because they’d send you home if they knew. But there’s nothing wrong with being different. My nephew’s autistic--which is how I figured it out, by the way--and I wouldn’t want him to change. I’d punch anyone who tried.”

“But it’s not like the world’s gonna change for me,” said Mac. “I’m just one person. So I have to adapt. Nobody gets anywhere in life unless they speak the language of the people in power. And most communication is nonverbal--the 93% statistic is a myth, it comes from only two studies and they were methodologically flawed for assessing normal communication, but it’s still a lot. I’m not good at that naturally, so I have to work at it. And I thought I was doing okay, but apparently not...” Mac’s voice had an odd edge to it, like some strong emotion was being forced through a funnel into his voice, so only a concentrated point slipped out.

“There’s nothing wrong with your acting,” said Jack, deciding to address that point first, since it was clearly causing Mac the most distress. “I just know you well enough to see past it. And maybe the world won’t change, but the people close to you? Can and should. You don’t have to keep up the act around me, you know.”

Mac looked distressed and confused, and Jack immediately wondered if he’d said something wrong.

“But... but if I let myself do it wrong, ever, I’ll get out of practice and then I won’t be able to do it right when I need to.”

“Okay. First, it’s not  _ doing it wrong, _ it’s  _ being yourself _ . Second, who told you that?”

Mac was quiet for a moment.

“My dad,” he finally said. “The only reason I seem as normal as I do is because he used to drill me on this stuff, all the time. Eye contact, body language... what to say and not say...”

Jack looked at him. “And how old were you at the time?”

“Between six and ten.”

“Did he ever let you... y’know, just be a kid?”

The response rolled off Mac’s tongue easily. “People like me don’t get that. Not if we want to be any good to anyone.”

“Okay,” said Jack, “that’s bullshit.”

Mac tilted his head. “What do you--”

“I mean every kid deserves a chance to be a kid. Not getting drilled on how to be a perfect little normal person to match someone else’s idea of what they should be.”

“I mean, it was for my own good. I would never have been able to be here, or at MIT, or anywhere else I’ve been or anywhere else I’ll ever go if I hadn’t learned not to be so weird and... and  _ wrong _ .”

Jack’s stomach felt like it was twisting into knots.

“Mac,” he said. “Listen to me. Being weird is fine--and you are not, nor have you ever been,  _ wrong  _ as a person.”

“You didn’t know me then--”

“But I know my nephew, and there’s nothing wrong with him. His brain just works different from most people’s--and yeah, sometimes people think that’s weird, but  _ there’s nothing wrong with that. _ Weird is just another word for out of the ordinary, something people don’t understand and so don’t trust.” He paused. “If you weren’t weird, I’d be dead.”

Mac smiled a little. “Fair point.”

“You do what you do because you think in ways nobody else does. Normal is overrated.”

Mac sighed. “Yeah, but if I couldn’t  _ act _ normal, I wouldn’t be able to use any of it.”

“Maybe not here. But somewhere? I’m willing to bet that, even if you couldn’t pass for normal, you’d be helping people somehow. There’s lots of ways you can do that, you know.”

Mac was quiet for a bit. “Yeah, I know.”

“And you’ve got years of practice keeping up the act. I hate that you have to do it at all, but you’re right, here it’s necessary. But not when it’s just me. You’re not gonna forget how if you drop it sometimes--and I think it’ll free up more space in your brain for you to do your job.”

Jack could see Mac turning that over in his head.

“I wish I could,” Mac finally said. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, you know that. But... I’ve tried to stop acting a few times before, with Bozer, and... I can’t. I don’t know how anymore. It’s muscle memory, at this point.”

“Then why do you stop doing it when you’re concentrating on something?”

“I do? Huh. I guess my brain’s just prioritizing. But it’s not a conscious thing.”

Jack thought for a moment. “What exactly did your dad tell you about what to do and not do?”

“Well, he never really told me anything about what to do, just whether I’d gotten it right or not,” said Mac casually. “He gave me some books on body language, and I basically taught myself until I was getting it right more often than wrong. I mean,  _ something _ was always wrong, but by the time I was ten I could usually figure out what it was...”

Jack decided that saying his thoughts on that out loud was unlikely to be helpful. Instead, he said, “what did you learn?”

“Make eye contact. Not too much, but more often than not. More with women than with men. Excess eye contact is perceived as a threat, especially by men, but too little seems disengaged and disrespectful. Stand straight but not too straight, that just looks weird. Don’t cover your body with your arms or turn away from someone you’re talking to. Don’t be literal--there’s a long list of idioms I have memorized, and if someone says something that seems really weird there’s a good chance it’s one you don’t know. Use contractions. Walk with your head up, and don’t randomly run. Take turns in conversation. Don’t fidget--it’s disrespectful and makes people think you aren’t paying attention. Look at whoever’s speaking. Don’t move around too much when you’re standing or sitting, but don’t be stock-still either.” Mac looked down. “And don’t infodump.”

“In this case, someone asked you to,” Jack pointed out. “And holy shit.”

“There’s a lot more,” said Mac. “And that’s just an outline. I had to learn  _ how _ to do all that stuff too.”

“Well,” said Jack. “You can keep acting around me or not, whichever is easier for you. But if you want to learn how  _ not _ to do all that? Start by figuring out what’s uncomfortable from that list and just not doing it. You wanna cross your arms, cross your arms. You don’t wanna look me in the eye, don’t look me in the eye. You wanna fidget, by all means fidget.” Jack’s eyes widened, and he smiled sideways. “Hang on a sec, you totally  _ do _ fidget! What else do you call those paperclip things?”

Mac smiled. “Yeah. I started when Dad left. Figured if it was semi-productive it was okay. It kind of keeps me sane.”

Jack nodded approvingly. “Then go right on making those paperclip whatchamacallits.”

“That’s the plan.” Then, he held something up.

Jack’s eyes had been on the road and Mac’s face, so he hadn’t noticed Mac’s busy hands.

Mac was holding a paperclip brain.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello again! I hope you liked this! If you did, please let me know below!
> 
> Mandatory rant ahead: while the specifics of what James did were invented, people depriving their autistic children of their childhoods in order to "fix" them is very much not. Please, for the love of God, if you're reading this and have an autistic kid, they're a person, not a project. Someday that kid is going to be an adult, and, I promise, intensive "treatments" backfire. They leave us burnt out, traumatized, and without healthy boundaries. While I was lucky enough to escape this myself, many people were not, and those who share their stories (and not all those who can share their stories can speak!) uniformly have similar things to say. There are more important things in life than being (or passing for) "normal".  
> Okay, angry autistic CatWingsAthena out.


End file.
